Why people don't like talking religion and politics at the dinner table

The reason why these topics get so sensitive is that we transfer our discussion of the issues, which can be difficult, to a discussion of the people who hold the positions in question, which is easier. It is easier to talk about Democrats than it is to talk about Democratic policies, it is easier to talk about believers (or unbelievers) rather than beliefs. But when people take this "easier" path, we find that the conversation takes on a personal tone that is missing when we just talk about the issues. It is easier to say "Atheists just don't want to believe in God" or "religion is a crutch" instead of seriously considering the reasons why one should, or should not believe in God. But to say that religion is a crutch, or to say that atheists just don't want to acknowledge God, is to go beyond saying that the other side's belief is false to actually insulting the person on the opposing side.




If we could all learn to avoid what in logic is called the ad hominem fallacy, we could discussion politics and religion at the dinner table without raising the hair on the back of anyone's neck.

Give me your tired, your poor

And if they're very, very lucky, they can come to America. This is from Forbes Magazine.

Some argue that they are only opposed to illegal immigration and that those who wish to move to the U.S. should go through the legal channels. I'm afraid this is a dodge: American immigration law is cumbersome and wasteful; further, most of the people who wish to move here stand no chance of being allowed to (Reason offers these handy directions to legality). Perhaps you're proud that your ancestors "came here legally." I'm pretty sure they would be denied entry today.

Without just advocating open borders, it seems to me that we can ask whether they should be more open than they in fact are, and whether our immigration policy is rational.

Michael Medved on Immigration

Is Comprehensive Immigration Reform Amnesty?

I often hear the statement that "comprehensive immigration reform" or a "path to citizenship" is just another word for amnesty.

If we took an offense that originally involved a jail sentence, and we change the penalty so that the person gets community service, is that amnesty?

This is from The Catholic News Agency

The reform would require those who have broken the law to pay a fine, pay owed back taxes and learn English. He said these requirements rebut claims that immigration reform is a kind of amnesty, since amnesty is a benefit granted “without anything in return.”
If you are penalizing an action, but you are not penalizing it in a different way than one would ordinarily have expected, is that amnesty?

The rebuttal might be that if you said if you let a murderer off with community service plus a fine, that's still surely amnesty, even though the person was penalized.

When I think of amnesty, I think of the law saying "Oh forget it." I don't see that in these proposals.

The Lakers-Celtics final is finally a reality

The biggest factor in this series, to me, was Kobe Bryant's absolute consistency. He got over 30 every time except when he was doubled consistently. Then he got all sorts of assists. When the Lakers lost two games, Bryant got in everybody's face about defense.

The last time the Suns got in the Finals, in 1993, the lost to a team with Phil Jackson as coach, and there was this superstar on that team, who produced a Bryant-like performance. His name was, I believe, Jordan.

Do I support open borders?

Bill Vallicella asked me.

No. But I strongly suspect that barriers to legal immigration are probably excessive. We do have to keep out people with criminal records.
I think it's probably a false dilemma, or a straw man, to claim that anyone who wants to reform the immigration system simply wants open borders. It also doesn't follow that all "path to citizenship" programs are simply amnesty. Those that I have heard proposed involved paying a penalty, and earning citizenship. (I realize there are a wide range of fairness issues involved in all of this, but the idea that such plans involve our just forgetting that people are here illegally doesn't seem right to me at all).
This is an Ed Montini column which discusses the effort of Tyson Nash, the hockey player (not related to the Suns Steve Nash, apparently), who, in spite of being a model citizen, came close to being deported. It seems to me that I could ask whether we could make immigration easier without advocating open borders.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2010/05/21/20100521Montini0521.html
I am also convinced that we've have to combine a partial immigration reform with an increase in border security. I'd rather stop them before they come in than send them back after they've settled in and started contributing to our community.
As for the illegal immigrants that are already here, there are questions in my mind about what the economic impact of their removal from our community would be. The departures from Prince William County in Virginia, which was the basis for the movie 9500 Liberty, showed that it resulted in a lot of economic harm, and an increase in the rate of foreclosures. In short, illegal immigrants are a mixed curse, since they become part of our community and do contribute to its economy, pay taxes, etc. I'm not even sure it's physically possible to deport all of them, anyway. That flaming liberal Michael Medved said that in order to send all of the back you'd need buses that, laid end to end, would stretch from Tijuana to Seattle.
On the other hand, the people that actually do transport these desperate people over the border are, so far as I can tell, the worst sorts of criminals, and surely we can hit them as hard as possible.
I seriously doubt that 1070 is going to result in very many deportations. The cost in ill will between the Hispanic community and the rest of us, to my mind, far outweighs the improvement in will provide in law enforcement, which I suspect will be minimal.
So, without actually having done a full cost-benefit analysis on all of this, I would say start with security at the border, make the process of immigration more rational but don't just throw it wide open, and then provide some path to citizenship that involves a serious penalty and isn't just simple amnesty.
A fence? Yes, if it would work, no, if it wouldn't.

Critical Game 5

The Suns try to take it to LA's home court, and they have to get one either in this game or in game 7. It's odd how home court means a lot in some series and not in others. Over in the Eastern Conference, three of the five games have been won by visitors.

For the first time, there seems to be some serious doubt about who the winner will face in the Finals. Two Celtics got concussions, and the Celtics can't afford to play with a short bench.

In the Finals series the Suns played against the Chicago Bulls in 1993, only one game was won at home, and six were won by the visitors.

Doug Jesseph replies to Craig on directly experiencing God

And, now finally, to the question of whether God can be known. Is it possible, peering into one's own mind to find the still small voice that testifies to the existence of God? Here, I think, there is really a problem. A problem for the theist who will hold that he has a reliable, right, route to the truth, a reliable way of determining when God is talking and when not. David Koresh, for example, was firmly persuaded that he was in contact with God. I suspect that most of you would not be...would not welcome, right, the truth of that hypothesis; that he must of been the victim of some deception. But, if the only thing that matters is one's own subjective sense of certainty, that "Yes, this is God talking", it would appear that there is no objective means for determining when someone's religious experiences are correct, when they are veridical, so to speak, when they match up with the way the world is and when they are not.

Speaking with conviction

Having a belief that something is really true is, you know, uncool. From Taylor Mali.

What is it like to ban abortion

This New York Times magazine article talks about some countries, like El Salvador, that do ban it.

A positive argument from reason

I'll have to give this some more thought.

The Fifty Per Cent Solution

What's wrong with SB 1070?


Well, my main concern is with the "reasonable suspicion" clause. That strikes me as horribly vague. Some people think that when they see a lower-class Hispanic-looking person who speaks Spanish much better than English, then we can reasonably suspect that they are illegal immigrants. We already have a county Sheriff who goes fishing for illegal immigrants.




In our state, most illegals are Hispanics, but most Hispanics are not illegals. If you define your conception of what it takes to have reasonable suspicion, and on my blog I made an un-remarked-upon recommendation that we have reasonable suspicion just in case we have objective criteria leading to the conclusion that it is more likely than not that the person is illegal, then you could at least eliminate the worst of the profiling problems. You can't just stop a Hispanic and make an immigration status inquiry, because being Hispanic is not sufficient for it to be more than 50% likely that the person is here illegally.


It isn't just a racial issue; most illegal immigrants make less money than people here legally, and they are more likely to be monolingual Spanish speakers or poor English speakers than their legal counterparts. But if these criteria are going to be sufficient to justify and immigration inquiry then, since such in inquiry is considerably discommoding to its object, it runs afoul of a basic conviction that law-abiding citizens should not be treated differently by the government because of race, color, or national origin.



If these criteria are not sufficient, then I have doubts as to whether the law will actually get much of anybody deported. So my "fifty per cent solution" may result in the law not result in invidious profiling, but it might also render the law ineffective.



 

The Suns are back

At least for now.

Reasonable Suspicion and a Preponderance of the Evidence

One article I read made the case the "reasonable suspicion" is in a family of terms including "preponderance of the evidence." A preponderance of the evidence seems to me to be require a better than 50% likelihood. That's why it was so easy for the civil jury to find O. J. liable for the double murders, even though he was acquitted in criminal court. Civil court requires a preponderance of the evidence, criminal court requires that it be beyond reasonable doubt. It seems to me that one way of construing SB 1070 so as to avoid some of the most serious concerns about it would be to construe "reasonable suspicion" in just this way. While most illegals in Arizona are Hispanic, most Hispanics in Arizona are not illegal, and therefore merely being Hispanic should not be sufficient to generate reasonable suspicion so defined. Even criteria like lower-class clothing, playing Spanish-language music, and communicating mostly in Spanish would not be sufficient for reasonable suspicion. Though I suppose standing on the sidewalk of a Home Depot looking for day-labor work might be sufficient.

The point is, if a person is asked for papers, there has to be sufficient objective evidence that makes it more than 50% likely that the person is here illegally. (I admit that being a subjectivist about prior probabilities makes this recommendation more difficult.)

I kind of doubt I'd vote for the bill if I were a member of the State Senate even with this gloss. But it would certainly help if it were understood in this way.

Is the Profiling Charge Trivial?

Steve Hays of Triablogue: Victor Reppert has made a shocking discovery. Thankfully, it took a man of his philosophical acumen to ferret this out. Reppert just discovered that laws disproportionately impact lawbreakers. Yes, you heard me right. Laws discriminate against outlaws. They have the insidious potential to single out non-law abiding citizens.

For example, laws against drunk driving single out drivers. By contrast, laws against DUI don’t profile joggers or swimmers–only drivers.

It’s appalling that in this day and age we still have such pernicious laws on the books. Time to stage a protest. Riot in the streets.

My reply: Hence, if a law is typically broken by a certain group, that group will on one level be disproportionately affected by the law. So the mere fact of disproportionate impact doesn't show that there is any invidious profiling.

However, it is possible that a law might have a disproportionate impact of one group as opposed to another that affects people who don't break the law. In other words, if a law, say, the law against illegal border-crossing, is violated by Hispanics far more than any other group, then if we try to catch them, there will of course be a completely benign disproportionate impact.

However, that doesn't dispel all objections to profiling, as some people seem to think that it does. It might turn out that a law not only affects law-breaking Hispanics, but also law-abiding Hispanics. If, let's say, the Maricopa County Sheriff were to perform a "crime sweep" in largely lower-class Hispanic areas as a sort of fishing expedition for illegal immigrants, using other statutes as a pretext for making stops that might lead to a paper check and a possible deportation, what we will find is that many law-abiding Hispanics will be caught in the net. Even if the vast majority of illegals are Hispanics, the majority of Hispanics are here legally.

Now, we can argue from here that the disproportionate impact on law-abiding Hispanics as opposed to law-abiding Anglos and African-Americans is a price worth paying to crack down on illegal immigration. That would be another argument. However, the implicit argument in this kind of statement, that the charge of racial profiling is invariably trivial, doesn't work.

A blog post on The Irreducible Mind on NDEs

William Lycan's reconsideration of dualism

A redated post.

William Lycan considers the case against dualism, and concludes that it is largely overrated.

Suns versus the Lakers

The Suns are battling the LA Lakers. The Lakers just got their first lead.

Six arguments for legalizing murder

What does this tell us about arguments?

1. Some people, like O. J. Simpson, are able to find good enough lawyers to get them acquitted if they commit a murder. This is an economic injustice which needs to be rectified. So murder should be legalized so that everyone, rich or poor, can knock people off without being punished.


2. The illegality of murder means that people are depending on the government, instead of on themselves, to protect their lives. Such government dependence is a bad thing, and would be eliminated if murder were legalized.

3. The unborn, since Roe. V. Wade, can be murdered at will. But protecting the lives of people after they are born is birth discrimination. Therefore, murder should be legalized.

4. “Thou shalt not kill” is a religious commandment, and to enforce it as law it to impose religion on the public. Since church and state should be separate, and the imposition of religion by government is unconstitutional, murder should be legalized.

5. Government’s protection of people’s lives, instead of letting those who allow themselves to be murdered to die, weakens the gene pool. So we should legalize murder and let natural selection do its job.

6. The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar has argued that it is better for people if they were never born. Legalizing murder will allow people to improve the lives of the victims.

Want to know what profiling looks like? Sheriff Arpaio's record speaks for itself

Do we really want the immigration law enforced this way?